Strategy:Shottyman

Main Guide (v0.9.9.4)

Version Changes (v0.9.9.5)

Nothing significant to the trait itself.

General Tactics

Basic strategy posted by theduck101 18:12, 26 November 2011 (CEST)

Shottyman is an advanced trait, allowing you to reload your equipped shotgun automatically with every move you make. To access it you need to take two levels of Reloader.

Obviously Shottyman is a shotgun specialist trait. It ameliorates the shotgun's biggest weakness: the need to reload after every shot. If you plan to centre your game around shotguns or are playing as an Angel of Shotgunnery then this is a very important trait.

The first thing with Shottyman is to get out of the habit of reflexively hitting the 'r' key after every shotgun round. Instead, to get the most of Shottyman you should learn to use the reload provided by movement.

Fire and motion is the path to Shottyman success. The tactical advantage of moving and reloading at once is that it gives you the chance to dodge in the middle of combat and return fire the next move. Knowing how to dodge effectively is therefore critical. A good habit to get into is to use diagonal movement (pgup, pgdown, home and end keys) as your default. I won't go into the details (see Dodging for the full rundown) but the most important idea is this: never move parallel to the firing line of your enemy i.e:

            XXX
O************@
            XXX

Moving to one of the squares marked with an X will give a chance to dodge the cacodemon's next shot.

With Shottyman, you'll reload pretty fast (two levels of Reloader will have you reloading a normal shotgun in about 0.6s). This makes corner shooting more effective as you can fire more shots than normal before an enemy can close in. This combined with the reload and move mechanic of Shottyman gives you a nice set of options: you can reload and fire at a sergeant before he has time to fire or you can move between the sergeant and another enemy to take advantage of a little friendly fire killing the sergeant on the next move.

For a nice increase to your damage output move in such a way that the knockback caused by your shot will push an enemy into a pool of acid/lava. This can be especially important in later levels because it will destroy the enemy corpse's making Arch-viles a little easier to deal with.

Reducing your move time through things like tactical boots/armour greatly increases the efficacy of Shottyman. The faster you move the more shots you can fire and the quicker you can get to cover.

Also remember to use a shotguns area of effect when targeting. Instead of aiming for a single enemy fire in the approximate midpoint of a group of enemies (as long as they are far away enough to be in the cone of spread). This deals damage to all of them at once. Manoeuvre in such a way that you deal damage to the maximum number of enemies for each round fired.

The damage drop off for shotguns makes taking down opponents with a lot of hit-points difficult. Sometimes you'll have the ammunition to spare to keep firing into the distance. Other times a dangerous enemy will need to be killed quickly. To maximise damage you need to get in close: within about 5 squares of your target. This is especially true for the hard hitting but range impaired double shotgun. The problem is that the closer you get to an enemy the greater their chance to hit you and the lower your chance to dodge.

There are a few ways to get around this. One is to use a combat or tactical shotgun; the damage drop off is such that 9 squares of range will still give you some bang for your, umm, buck. Otherwise you need to run.

Running is an indispensable tactic with Shottyman. It gives you 29 moves of faster movement, increased dodging ability and reduced enemy accuracy. Even better, the downside of running, -2 accuracy, doesn't matter at all to a shotgun player since shotguns never miss. Running is therefore your Shottyman turbo mode. Medpacks and Health, Berserk, Invulnerability, Supercharge and Mega powerups all restore fatigue: think of each one of these not only as source of healing but also as 'turbo boost' for each use.

Running allows you to charge dangerous enemies and dodge a greater percentage of their attacks. The 20% dodging bonus means you will still dodge effectively even if you're close and if you get in close you can take them out quickly. It also allows you a chance to get out of dangerous situations if you need to. Running separates the good doomrl players from the rest - use it and use it well.

The move-and-reload ability of Shottyman is especially suited to powerful shotguns that take a long time to reload. The Double Shotgun (which is the arena prize if you're playing as an Angel of Shotgunnery) becomes a lot more useful when you don't have to worry about the 2s reload time.

Special mention should go to the Elephant gun. The elephant gun packs a punch (50% more damage than a regular shotgun) but comes with an horrendous reload time (the same as a chaingun!). Shottyman turns this lumbering beast into, if not an agile predator, then at least a predator that doesn't stop in the middle of a hunt to contemplate the meaning of life. An added bonus is that it deals out enough damage to be useful over a distance even with a normal shotgun damage decay.

The Combat Shotgun and it's bigger brother the Tactical Shotgun with their bigger clips and range are also fine options. They are especially suited for tactical play e.g. firing round corners and radar shooting.